The end of an era

Fair Warning. This is not going to be pretty. I have written and rewritten this post, after giving myself what I hoped was adequate time to cool down, so I don’t get myself into too much trouble. We’ll see if I’m successful or not. Ok, here I go. deep breath.....ok, hit it.

GSI killed off Phat Dragon. And Bundy has left in protest of the way the entire issue was handled. Tot is NOT a happy Warrior right now, trust me.

Ok, some background is in order here, I guess. Any of the oldsters that readers know the deal behind Phatty, but some of the newbloods might need some background. Nobody, with the exception of a select few people, know who the the Fat Dragon was, or if he was truly real or not. I would find it difficult to believe that anyone could actually act the way he did in all the stories - Hell, it’s hard enough work typing like he speaks, never mind acting like he does. What I do know is that it’s some of the funniest damned TF-related stuff I have EVER read in my life. PhD is completely politically incorrect, but the first thing you need to realize is that it is SATIRE. Once you get past the surface, and read it again, you realize there’s a lot more to PhD’s antics than meets the eye, quite often. I myself take great offense at things like homophobia, and other forms of utter stupidity - but when you read PhD, you knew the deal behind all that. Brilliant work, actually - hidden behind the veneer of what looks like the misadventures of a complete idiot. My favourite story is one of how PhD gets on a server, autoteams (he always autoteams) and gets assigned Red. Teams are then red has 3, and 8 on blue. A person on red says "someone switch please", and PhD say "OK", and goes Blue - making it 9 to 2.Nobody else on blue switches. The rest of the story details the price blue pays for not evening up the teams - having PhD on their team. LOL, it’s great stuff.

However, getting to the point - it’s true that PhD wasn’t exactly what you’d call PC - far from it. But anyone who read it, who took the time to think bout it - who was in tune with the gaming community as a whole - they would realize that it was merely satire, and take it at that. However, in this day and age it seems that people are unwilling to bother to TRY to think in the least, and instead look for things to cut down and rail against. It only took ONE email - one barely more literate than one of PhD’s posts - to get GSI to bring the hammer down on what they considered as "unsuitable material". Never mind that the page had been there for as long as PlanetFortress had been around as an entity. Never mind that it had gotten lots of positive fanmail from people who actually knew the deal behind it. I would add other comments in here, but I’m trying to be more neutral, and not go into a complete rant here.

Ok, fine - it’s not like Phatty had much to say as of late, anyhow - Bundy said he was going to talk with him about taking it down anyways, cause it had sat dormant for so long. However, the GSI management decided to say to get it off the server, NOW - without giving Bundy the courtesy of contacting him over the issue and personally expressing their concerns to him. For those of you that don’t know, Bundy has a LOT of history in the TF community, even before PlanetFortress came into existance. He was one of the founding members of the Doomsday Newswire - a TF community webpage popular back in the day. The staff of that page became THE people that brought us PlanetFortress - Bundy, The Hal, Spaceman Spiff, DieHard and others whose names I sadly cannot recall at this point. They set THE standard for TF community pages, and Bundy has been in the trenches with the rest all of that time. To get treated like that - with no consideration whatsoever - is a slap in the face. Let’s face it - yes, GSI provides the hardware and the bandwidth for the Planet sites - but who provides the content, that makes people come there in the first place, so they can see the banner ads that are there. Yes, it’s the "little people", like Bundy - unpaid volunteers that crank out material that make people come and read the pages. They are the ones that generate all the hits. But I should have expected the change in mentality from when it went from a fan community centric idea, to big business. You cease being a person, and just become an entry in a debit/credit column when that happens.

So, in light of the treatment Bundy got in this issue, he has severed ALL ties with GSI-related matters. He’s told me he’s tossed his PF and PQ email accounts, asked to be removed from the PF Admin list, etc. And you know, I don’t blame him ONE bit - I know the inside story as to what happened, and I’m not amused either. Since he’s not going to have access to his old PF email account anymore - if anyone wishes to send him email about comments on this issue, feedback on his contributions here, etc - you can send it to me, and I’ll forward it to him. Presently he’s out of town on urgent personal business, but when he returns, I’ll forward any correspondance to him. People that already know him and are friends with him have his personal email address already, so you can contact him that way. I’ve contacted some of the people he might not have been able to before he had to leave, and will continue to do so.

Finally, he sadly asked to be completely disassociated with anything here on PF as well - to include the name of the page. So at present myself and Teatime are trying to come up with a new name for the page. If we cannot come up with any strokes of genius, we can always just call it "The Fort". If anyone has any good ideas, email us with them, and you might be the one to gain infamy for renaming this place - as much as it hurts me to have to do so.